The Mother’s Milk of Digital.

The 2012 national election was a watershed moment for political marketing. Republicans and Democrats didn’t agree on much prior to that election, but the very next day they agreed on one big thing: the Obama team’s sophisticated use of data enhanced digital and social marketing made all the difference in the world. In the words of one Republican operative at an industry conference, “we were like a very good high school team playing the New England Patriots. We won’t let that happen again.”

No doubt there will be record amounts spent on the 2016 national, state and local elections, not to mention the lengthy primary season. However you feel about the role of money in politics, both parties – plus an overwhelming number of PACs – are going to double down on digital. There’s no question it’s going to rain money; it’s just not clear how many of us are going to get wet. As I’ve trained digital sales teams over the years the topic of digital political advertising often comes up, but the depth of that conversation is not where it should be. Many sellers still believe that the primary role of the political ad is to convince someone to vote for a given candidate, ignoring how digital factors into fundraising, list development, voter mobilization, turnout and so much more.

Two close friends of mine – who both also happen to be legends in our business – are doing something about this gap. On Thursday August 6th at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, John Durham and Rick Parkhill will be hosting the Political Advertising Summit. They’re assembling some terrific speakers for the purpose of informing and training digital sellers about the opportunity ahead and what it will take to realize it. I have no stake in the outcome, except as an attendee and fellow traveler; I plan to go myself to learn more about this important set of topics. If you’re a seller who’s been tasked with going after 2015-16 campaign and initiative dollars, or if you have one on your team, here’s a link to help you sign up for this important event. I hope to share the day with you or someone from your organization.

An old maxim tells us that money is the mother’s milk of politics. While that is certainly (and perhaps unfortunately) still true, we owe it to ourselves and our companies to pursue those dollars as smartly and effectively as we can. Doing less that that is to ignore the lesson of 2012 and leave your company wondering what happened on the Wednesday after Election Day.

2 comments

The sea change that the “Republican operative” is talking about is in data management. The “very good high school football team” was using massively scalable SQL databases – the kind of enterprise data capability that huge companies turn to Oracle to provide. That was the GOP.

The Obama Campaign (the team that was analogous to the New England Patriots) was using Hadoop – Hadoop is the kind of data management capability that makes things like Google Search perform like magic.

The difference is a database that can sort and manage every bit of data about every candidate in the context of every single voting district (that would be High School Football) versus a data base that can sort and manage every bit of available data for every individual voter in the United States (that would be the Patriots).

The 2016 Presidential election will be a competition to win votes one individual voter at a time. By the time we get within 48 hours of election day, if the election is very close in the manner that these things tend to be, there will be a few thousand voters who live in critical voting districts in one or two Battlefield States that will tip the election. History suggests that they will live in Ohio and Florida. This is not new. What is going to change is that both campaigns will know exactly who these voters are, name/address/phone number/social security number/social networking behavior/purchasing behavior/plus click behavior related to issue advertising display ads.

The ability to turn out exactly the right voters in the right counties while letting other potential voters who appear to be sitting this one out stay right where they are on their couch or in their office will be where data makes the biggest difference.

Let’s say you are 70 years old, retired to Florida in a Republican political district but you raised your kids in a Boston suburb and have expressed liberal opinions on Facebook and it is 3PM on election day and you still have not voted. The Democratic side is going to knock on your door (purely in the role of non-partisan good Samaritan) and offer you a ride to the voting booth. They will do that because they are 99% certain how you will vote if they can just get you into the booth.

That’s what Obama did with Hispanic voters who would probably not have voted on election day in 2012. That is why the GOP exit polls had the GOP thinking that Romney was winning while the Obama campaign (not the DNC) knew that something very different was actually happening.